„Those Silent, Unspoken Identities“: Ancestral Legacy and Queer Identity in Marusya Bociurkiw‘s Works

In 1993, when Marusya Bociurkiw, one of the English-speaking Ukrainian-Canadian writers, was only beginning her literary and artistic career, the author contemplated the nature and purpose of her work in one of her essays in the following way: “The crossing of borders from the realm of sexual identity to the realm of cultural identity, and of finding a language that works for both, is, I have to say, the biggest challenge I have faced in my work thus far”. Bociurkiw stated these words before the publication of her first book, a collection of short stories The Woman Who Loved Airports (1994), which was consecutively followed by her volume of poems Halfway to the East (1999), a novel The Children of Mary (2006), and a multi-generic work of fiction Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007), but all of these works testify to Bociurkiw’s aim set for herself already at the beginning of her path as a writer. Thus, the author has been actively engaged in the literary/artistic discussion of ethnicity and queer identity, which explores, among other issues, a question about the (extent of) correlation between one’s cultural belonging (and, what comes with it, ancestral legacy) and one’s gender and sexual identity. The essence of this point of discussion has been captured by Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, which Bociurkiw quotes, closing her 1993 essay, and with which her further writing is clearly resonant: “Where are our alliances, with our cultures, or our crotch?”. Consequently, the aim of this lecture is to examine this question by putting it in a particular context, i. e. its presentation in Marusya Bociurkiw’s works.
Dr. Weronika Suchacka was born in Słubice, Poland. She studied English Philology at the University of Szczecin and British and North American Studies at the University of Greifswald. She works as a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Szczecin. In the academic year 2014/15 she is a fellow at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Alexander Wöll